The Giant’s Foot Scrubber

EVENT DESCRIPTION

For Square Street Gallery’s upcoming exhibition, “The Giant’s Foot Scrubber,” we are inviting a group of artists that address the suspension of disbelief, the occult, and landscape.

To think about fiction is to think about what lies before and beyond it. It is to think through conflicts and climaxes, heroes and villains, battles and fights, winners and losers. But to think about fiction with Ursula Le Guinn—author, speculator, creator of worlds—is to think through potatoes and oatmeal and gourds and pouches instead. We have been asked to consider and incorporate the hero (the protagonist, the winner, the fighter, the sword) and his conflict (his fight, his battle, his beast, his mammoth) into our stories since we were children. They are, after all, what makes fiction—or are they? 

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), Le Guinn compares stories to gathering vessels, bags that carry grains that make a world. She writes, “Finally, it’s clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.” She asks us to consider the myth (or the necessity) of the hero and its ramifications. What kind of stories do we want told? Do we only want a story about triumphs? Do we want stories that create pedestals? Or do we want stories that are fashioned as carrier bags: intricately woven but holding things, one next to the other, as human lives usually are?